In monthly column The A-to-Z of Trash, bad movie lover Eliza Janssen takes us on an alphabetically-ordered trip through the best bits of the worst films ever. This month, it’s the revolting, laugh-a-minute movie 20th Century Fox would prefer if we quietly forgot: Alex Winter’s gonzo comedy Freaked.
Could’ve done Freddy Got Fingered for this month, but it’s been reappraised as a surreal piece of punk art already. Could’ve done Foodfight, but I might’ve lost my mind. Instead, in trying to find a movie that wrongfully received an F report card from the industry that aborted it, I couldn’t go past the 1993 flop Freaked. From a $12 million dollar budget, Tom Stern and Alex Winter’s splatter-comedy made less than $30k back at the box office, only screening in two theatres in the US after poor test screenings and a disastrous change in studio leadership. The new head honchos at 20th Century Fox were appalled at the film’s strangeness, changing its name from original title “Hideous Mutant Freekz” and murdering its advertising budget.
These days, I stridently believe that the film belongs on the studio’s new streaming home Disney+, where a generation of imaginative kids who are sick to death of ultra-realistic Disney/Pixar CGI can rediscover Freaked‘s ingenious ickiness; its bitchy, Hollywood-hating digs at Christian Slater and Kevin Costner; and Keanu Reeves in an uncredited appearance as Ortiz the Dog Boy. Like the works of Tod Browning and David Lynch before it, this is a stomach-churning gem that dares to ask: who are the real freaks? Those with spurting geysers of pus on their foreheads, and assholes that can fart out jets of flame? Or we who would dare to censor them?
Riding high at this point off the success of two Bill & Ted movies, Winter and his collaborators from unhinged MTV sketch comedy series The Idiot Box assembled a dream team of artistic and comedic talent for their first feature film. We’re talking future Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke as production designer, The Butthole Surfers on soundtrack duty, and the work of three different companies for the film’s extensive, grotesque practical effects. Prime among these was Screaming Mad George, the Japanese-American lunatic behind such spectacles as Predator‘s jaws, Society‘s unforgettable “shunting” orgy, and all the madness of Big Trouble in Little China. George really outdoes himself here, crafting a full-body worm suit for one of the film’s freaks, plus two Ren & Stimpy-esque mutant monsters for the film’s final-act beatdown.
Winter stars, too, as slimy Hollywood hotshot Ricky Coogan; in opening scenes that set a gag-heavy pace comparable to spoofs such as Airplane!, he agrees to endorse a highly toxic fertilizer known as Zygrot 24 for evil conglomerate E.S.S. (Everything Except Shoes). All he has to do is head to South America to promote the stuff, and try not to get lulled into the backwater sideshow of madman Elijah C. Skuggs (a wild-eyed Randy Quaid). Of course that’s just what he, his horndog best mate Ernie (Michael Stoyanov), and angry feminist Julie (Megan Ward) do, quickly getting gunged with the very Zygrot 24 they’re trying to spruik, and morphing into new freaks for Skuggs’ establishment in the process.
Ernie and Julie become a two-headed, four-limbed chimera, leading to lame gags about him trying to get in her pants whilst experiencing her PMS at the same time—but Ricky is subjected to a worse fate yet, half of his face and body contorted into a Gremlin-esque mass of gnarled green flesh and oozing pimples. To escape with his photogenic former self intact, he’ll have to first embrace his freakhood, and work together with a stable of unstable monsters such as Mr. T in drag as proud transwoman The Bearded Lady, and Bobcat Goldthwait as my favourite of the mutants, a screaming sock atop a human body. When the rest of the freaks are relating their tragic tales of body horror transformation, his yarn anti-climactically ends with; “…then Elijah turned me into a sock. I’m sorry, I’m not much for stories.” It kills me, what can I say.
In fact, there are countless “bits”, aesthetic choices, The Simpsons-esque sight gags from this film that blow my mind. It starts right from the stop-motion credits sequence, clay masterfully cross-sectioned to show psychedelic shapes and faces—check out title designer David Daniels’ website for a closer look at this painstaking creative process. Brooke Shields bookends the film as a blithe TV host who admits that her film Return to the Blue Lagoon “sucked”. Two of Skuggs’ henchmen are eyeballs on legs, with machine guns, who speak in Jamaican accents. There’s an extended heist sequence of the freakish gang trying and failing to silently break into the villain’s lab, creating a ruckus that ends with a styrofoam cup falling gently the ground. Quaid only hears this sound, spinning to the camera to darkly mutter: “Hmm…styrofoam cup.”
Quaid is a brilliant, commanding part of the demented puzzle. It’s a shame he went from wildly-committed heel turns like Freaked and the also-underappreciated Parents, to his comic relief hillbilly role in Independence Day, and then spiralled into total QAnon quackery. This movie’s anything-goes, Mad magazine approach to comedy allows for him and every other cast member to push their performances to 11, making Freaked a suitably harebrained PG watch for quirky kids and brainless, giggling stoner adults alike.
The film cleanly divided critics in its time, earning a stuffy 50% on Rotten Tomatoes from retro reviews. But to watch it today is to bask in a blissfully juvenile comic vision that feels before its time in its pure, energetic randomness—all backed up by surprising star cameos and impeccable, gooey filmmaking craft.
Not that it’s easy to throw Winter and co. a buck in order to enjoy the film or anything. Just quietly, some good Samaritan has uploaded the whole mess onto YouTube in HD, but I’ll be waiting, my 12 fingers and three tentacles crossed tightly, in the hopes that Disney wakes up and unleashes this awe-inspiring mutation onto its nice, respectable platform. Chuck some Zygrot 24 into Elsa and Anna’s world and see what happens.
